Philip Rieff adopted the categories and language of Freud, but reinterpreted them in a way that supported culture and the moral life. Batchelder and Harding have edited a new volume of essays on Rieff, who they argue is a key thinker for any attempt to diagnose late modern cultural life. They join host James Patterson to discuss Rieff, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan Sontag, and unimaginable depravities. 

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The Philosophy of Philip Rieff: Cultural Conflict, Religion, and the Self

Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund. Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty. With me today are my guests, William G. Batchelder IV, and Michael P. Harding. They are co-editors of a new edited volume titled The Philosophy of Philip Rieff: Cultural Conflict, Religion, and the Self.

It’s just come out on Bloomsbury Press and we’ll be talking at length about why we should take an interest in Rieff and what insights he has to contemporary life. Drs. Batchelder and Harding, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

William Batchelder:

Thank you, James.

Michael Harding:

Thank you.

James Patterson:

I should mention that we are all very good friends and know each other from many meetings of the Ciceronian Society. So if things get a little informal, it’s because of my lack of self-restraint. Drs. Harding and Batchelder, who was Philip Rieff?

Michael Harding:

I’ll let you take it, Bill.

William Batchelder:

All right. Philip Rieff was the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. That was his highest professional attainment. He was born, I think, in 1922 and died in 2006. As a young man, before he’d even finished his doctoral dissertation, he was teaching at the University of Chicago, where he met his first wife, the young Susan Sontag. He was actually married to, of course, one of America’s leading cultural critics. It was a short and tumultuous marriage. They were divorced, I think … Was it eight years later, Michael? Six years later?

Michael Harding:

It was relatively a short order, yeah.

William Batchelder:

And he was the author … He arrived on the scene intellectually with the publication of his first two books. The first was Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. And the second was The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud. The first of those was published, Michael, 58?

Michael Harding:

I think so, yeah.

William Batchelder:

Then, in the early ’60s for The Triumph of the Therapeutic. It was those two books that first made his name as an expositor of Freud. The second was an exposition of Freud, but also a departure from Freud in a couple important ways as he limbed other intellectuals who had departed from Freud, focused most particularly on Wilhelm Reich, on Carl Jung, and to a lesser extent on Adler and some other people who found Freud to be unsatisfying in the deliverance he could offer the afflicted in one way or the other. We can get into what that was to him. He turned his guns as it were on the academy in a work called Fellow Teachers, which I think is, Michael, 1973?

Michael Harding:

72, maybe 74.

William Batchelder:

And after Fellow Teachers he had a poet who admired him, called his great silence. It wasn’t really silent because there were three major articles that he published and a book review that somehow was half of My Life Among the Deathworks. He really did not … He had been on top of the world academically. He’s at Ivy and an endowed chair with two major publications, and a lot of people regarded Fellow Teachers as deliberate professional suicide. He didn’t divide it into chapters. He certainly didn’t divide it into subheadings or subchapters. As one of his essayists wrote about him, “He hid most of the important arguments in the footnotes.” Why did he deliberately do this to himself? There are a lot of different arguments about why he did this, but at any rate, save three or four important articles.

He was silent until the year of his death in 2006, when the first volume of what we call the Sacred Order/Social Order trilogy came out. That first volume is My Life Among the Deathworks. It’s hard to sum up one thing that My Life Among the Deathworks is about, but we can talk about Deathworks. Then, after he passed away, they published as the second volume, The Crisis of the Officer Class. The third volume, The Jew of Culture, came out the year following, and around the same time, posthumously, his students, bless them, put together and edited and put out the work that he had been doing apparently on and off for decades on Charisma, where he goes after Weber in one of Weber’s most important concepts, and revisits the idea and demands a correction in our conception of Charisma.

And this came out shortly after his death as well. We had this great silence, and at the end, really, what Sacred Order/Social Order is doing is offering his fully developed theory of culture. I think it’s fair to say that was the purpose of those books, particularly the first two volumes. Particularly Deathworks and Crisis of the Officer Class. Michael, would you add anything to that?

Michael Harding:

All right, I would add one little thing to it, yeah. In Crisis, chapter six, toward the fourth culture, he does make a comment that seems to apply to the entirety of his … At least his later work. He says, “These reading exercises have been an experiment in preparing the way for the teaching and symbolic institutions of a fourth culture.” One hesitates to call it a practical intent, but there is this … I guess we will call it a practical intent behind it or political intent, right? He’s not just saying, “Well, here’s my theory of culture.” He’s trying to actively shape the future to some degree, albeit with a lot less optimism about the possibility of doing it than somebody like Nietzsche.

James Patterson:

This is an interesting account because I suspect most of the listeners are only somewhat dimly aware, if at all, of Rieff. Did Rieff have any major students? Why is it that maybe he’s become more obscure? And why bring him back the way that this volume intends to do?

William Batchelder:

My favorite way to illustrate this, if students ask me about it, is to go to the third edition of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. The third edition was published on the 20th anniversary of the original publication of his first book. It was 1978. And in the third edition of Mind of the Moralist, you have the original forward to the book and then you have a second forward and an epilogue that he wrote on the occasion of the release of this 20th anniversary edition. And it reads like it’s written by a different person. He adopted a style of prose which can charitably be described as impenetrable. And if you look at Mind of the Moralist and The Triumph of the Therapeutic, you’re dealing with a very erudite person wrestling with very difficult concepts, but it’s traditional academic writing.

When you look at beginning with Fellow Teachers, but then especially everything after that, he deliberately adopts a prose style, which is absolutely forbidding. Both his publishing pattern and the manner in which he was writing suggest that he is deliberately being off-putting, that he is deliberately shunned. The popular success that his ex-wife had, Susan Sontag. Michael, would you add anything?

Michael Harding:

Yeah, the obscurity partly, I think. You’ve already addressed it. The man did make a deliberate choice to commit what Zondervan refers to as academic suicide with Fellow Teachers. From an academic perspective, it is a somewhat bizarre book. Then there is the difficulty of his work. And then I think there … I’m tempted to say he really did need to think more than he needed to write. I think that his turning away from the academic industrial complex activities that a lot of us are compelled to do, I think for him that was necessary for formulating this theory of culture. The manuscript history of Deathworks, I want to say, traces back to the ’80s. Parts of it were written in the ’80s, and there are, I guess, multiple different versions of it that were found in his files, if I remember correctly. In his papers.

James Patterson:

Oh wow. The prominence of psychoanalysis of Freud, something that seems very hard to recapture, but it was such a major phenomenon in the twentieth century. What is it that he had to say about Freud: Mind of the Moralists? Also, the nature of the therapeutic as it began to transform the culture?

Michael Harding:

I’ll leave that to you, Bill. You know the Freud element.

William Batchelder:

Well, in essence in our book, The Philosophy of Philip Rieff, one of the things that we say is that the reason that Rieff is interesting is he is a Freudian who has developed some serious problems